The Genius of Lon Chaney: LAUGH, CLOWN, LAUGH

Wednesday, October 17th, 2018

Posted byZachary Zahos

This essay on Herbert Brenon's Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928) were written by Tim Brayton, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A 35mm print of Laugh, Clown, Laugh will screen with live piano accompaniment by David Drazin on Saturday, October 20 at 7 p.m., as the second program in our "Silents Please!" series. The screening takes place in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. Free admission!

By Tim Brayton

Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera Pagliacci is a bitter, raging tragedy about a love affair ending in murder at the hands of a jealous husband. The 1928 feature film Laugh, Clown, Laugh, ultimately based on the opera – via a 1923 play in English, based upon a 1919 play in Italian, itself based upon the opera – is no less tragic, though it is far less bitter. Unlike the appealingly torrid opera, the film’s sorrows are almost entirely internal, its tragedy that of a man coming to grips with the knowledge that the world doesn’t care if he’s sad and old and alone.

So, a perfect scenario for silent cinema, with its singular ability to focus on the expressive powers of the human face. And a perfect scenario for Lon Chaney, whose face was expressive even by the standards of the late silent period. Though today we mostly associate Chaney with his skull-faced Phantom of the Opera, or his soulfully grotesque Quasimodo, hunchback of Notre Dame, more of Chaney’s career was in weepy character dramas, of a sort that Laugh, Clown, Laugh exemplifies. The role of an aging sad-sack who fruitlessly longs for hopeless love was a stock Chaney figure in the ‘20s, meaning that in this late-career role (he appeared in only five more features before his death at age 47), he’d had years of practice refining this character type. That experience pays off, with Chaney giving perhaps his own greatest performance, and one of the great tear-jerking screen turns of the era.

The plot is old-fashioned in its unabashed embrace of melodrama (and, we must confess, its sexual politics): an itinerant clown, Tito (Chaney), takes in an abandoned child, Simonetta. Years later, after she’s grown to adulthood (embodied by 14-year-old future movie star Loretta Young, in her first screen performance), Tito finds himself romantically obsessed with her, but he’s outmatched by Count Luigi Ravelli (Nils Asther), who is younger, handsomer, richer, and not her adopted father. The film leaves little doubt as to the outcome: even Tito recognizes from the start that he’s a totally inappropriate match for Simonetta, that he’s a bit pathetic even for fantasizing about it. This pathos is precisely the fuel of the film’s tragic melodrama, as we watch the middle-aged man grapple with his knowledge of the inevitability of his own loneliness, all while being forced to put on make-up and dance around for the mindless entertainment of audiences.

The irony is not applied with a light touch: signs declaring “Ridi, Pagliaccio” (“laugh, clown”, a key line from the opera’s most famous aria) abound, and the film boasts an angry anti-joke when Tito’s psychiatrist recommends that he should go to see the great clown Flik to cheer himself up, not knowing that Tito is Flik. What keeps Laugh, Clown, Laugh from feeling heavy-handed is partially the medium itself, and the almost mystical effect of silent cinema. If the emotions are drawn with a broad brush, this feels somehow not merely right, but necessary, as though Tito’s pain which cannot be expressed in spoken words must erupt out of his body somehow.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh came out in the last great year of silent cinema. The Jazz Singer had just been a massive hit, and the first all-talking picture, Lights of New York, was just three months in the future. The silent features of 1928 thus represent the last flourishing of a sophisticated, mature art form, and while this film lacks the tremendous innovation of The Crowd or The Wind, it nevertheless demonstrates much of that sophistication. The film was directed by Herbert Brenon, well-regarded in his day by critics (if not always by actors; by Young’s account, Chaney spent this film’s production constantly protecting her from Brenon’s verbal abuse), though many of his films have been lost: even this film is missing one of its reels, though the story is little affected as a result. He brings to the film, with the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, a complex mixture of close-ups and deep spaces, positioning characters against fully three-dimensional spaces like they’ve been dropped into dollhouse rooms, busy with bits and pieces of design. At the same time, the staging rarely allows the characters to fully navigate that space, except inasmuch as different layers of depth are used to keep them separated. The result is a busy, fleshed-out world that feels constantly separated from Tito, amplifying our impression that he is fundamentally alone.

It always comes back to Tito. The film’s beautiful cinematography, Young’s self-assured debut, and everything else notwithstanding, the film that lives and dies entirely on Chaney’s extraordinary work. We see displayed here some of the subtlest make-up he designed in his famous career, silently adding one year after another, exaggerating the wrinkles and whitening hairs. Even his bright white clown make-up, which practically radiates off the screen, changes to reflect time passing. For a film largely about the awareness of a middle-aged man that his time has passed, this never-stressed but omnipresent awareness of the physical toll of aging is heartbreaking in its own right.

Let us never say that Chaney was simply relying on his make-up, though! His work in Laugh, Clown, Laugh is, in this writer’s opinion, one of the great achievements of silent film acting, mixing stereotypically broad poses (to evoke his character’s theatrical background), with tightly constrained facial expressions that shift so gradually as to be nearly invisible. His body language alone imbues the film with an almost unbearable amount of human feeling: consider, for example the way he hangs his arms at his side, rocking his shoulders forward so that it almost seems that his hangdog look is going to pull him to the ground. And then combine the sheer exhaustion and sadness of that pose with Chaney’s skill at slowly allowing tears to form in the corner his eyes while his mouth is set in a curl of self-loathing, a devastating mix of pathos and self-accusation. If this is first and foremost a performance piece, the performance is enough to justify a whole feature: the final masterpiece from one of the quintessential silent film stars.

Expanding the Canon: THE RED KIMONA & THE CURSE OF QUON GWON

Wednesday, October 10th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on The Red Kimona and The Curse of Quon Gwon were written by Lillian Holman, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. Both films will screen in one program on Saturday, October 13 at 7 p.m., the initial program in our "Silents Please!" series. The screening takes place in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. Free admission!

By Lillian Holman

When thinking of great American silent films, it is common to only think of the names of the canonized greats. For example, Griffith, DeMille, Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd can all be listed without their first names and a good portion of those reading this will know exactly to whom I’m referring. That being said, if that same reader were asked to name other silent film directors, I’m sure the list would be much shorter. The limited sphere of this perception is due to two competing factors, neither of which is the implied reader’s ignorance. First, the names listed were certainly valorized in the years these films were released and have always been on the lips of movie fans. Second, they also represent a catalogue of films that happened to have been preserved partially due to that valorization. This issue of preservation is the more important of the two since so many silent films were lost due to the fragility of nitrate and the lack of consistent preservation standards at the time they were released. It means that even if we wanted to look beyond these names in the past, it has been too difficult or impossible. It is therefore a luxury now that new digital preservation techniques and wider spheres of inquiry are allowing many forgotten or “lost” films to be rereleased and finally shown to a modern public. The Red Kimona (1925), directed by Walter Lang and Dorothy Davenport, and The Curse of Quon Gwon (1926), directed by Marion E. Wong, are two of these treasures, and unlike the films made by the list above, were directed (or co-directed) by women and, in the case of Wong, directed by the woman thought-to-be the first Asian-American director regardless of gender.

Both these films deal intensely with the issues surrounding their directors’ gender and race. The Red Kimona is a shockingly relevant piece about the sacrifices women shouldn’t have to make and the violence they shouldn’t have to endure in order to work in show business or, in the case of our protagonist, to work at all. Davenport herself makes this abundantly clear in the very rare instance of direct address in the frame narrative of the film, where she “speaks” to the audience about how this is based on a true story and that there are women like our protagonist out there who we should both pity and take care of. It is easy to say that dealing with sexual harassment has always been an issue for women; it is quite different to see it played out almost 80 years before even the invention of Twitter, let alone the introduction of #MeToo.

Meanwhile, The Curse of Quon Gwon , a movie that only exists as a 35 minute fragment of its original feature length, is also about the female experience, but in a very different context than Red Kimona. The female protagonist of Curse, is navigating the more traditional customs of her new Chinese mother-in-law after she has been solidly immersed in western culture. It is a push and pull between the “ancient” and the “modern,” but with the “modern” meaning 1926. It is therefore a unique cultural artifact where we not only get to see a culture ridiculously underrepresented on screen, but we get to witness two different iterations of it and the struggles of westernization at a personal level. What is even more remarkable: the intertitles of Curse have been lost so we experience this all without words, yet it seems like nothing is lost at all.

While these films are remarkable for reasons beyond the identities of their directors, it is still worth taking a step back and noting the fresh perspective it allows us on Hollywood at the turn of the century. When Manohla Dargis wrote about these films on the occasion of July’s BAMcinématek series, “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers,” she wrote how:

Women have a history of being hidden in plain sight, whether they’re written out of even recent histories or yet more studio executives insist that that they can’t find suitable women to hire. A series like “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” is a crucial part of this revisionism, a corrective to our collective amnesia.

As Dargis suggests, the issue of racial and gender diversity in Hollywood is certainly nothing new, and when looking as far back as the 1920s, it is easy to overlook it or dismiss it as a product of the time, hence the “collective amnesia.” Such amnesia causes us to forget that there were in fact women working in high level creative spheres in Hollywood during the silent era, especially in the early years. Media historian Erin Hill also covers this forgotten chapter of film history when she mentions how in the early 1910s, “in this informal work system, a few women infiltrated such male-dominated fields … [and] ascended from the lower ranks of film companies to roles as writers, directors, producers, and production owners.” The “informal work system” Hill is referring to was the less standardized Hollywood where roles on set were more fluid and open to all, including the women present. She outlines how the increased standardization of the industry was one of the key factors that forced out female creatives. While Red Kimona and Curse of Quon Gwon came out 10 years after the era Hill is referring to and after systems of standardization were beginning to be in place, the women who worked on these films carry on this legacy of female authorship that began in the 1910s. In fact, Hill references Dorothy Arzner, co-writer of Red Kimona, specifically as one of the women who learned every aspect of the trade when she first arrived in Hollywood in the 1910s. Therefore, when we appreciate these films anew, not only are we expanding our canon of great films, they are giving us primary evidence of the work of female artists too easy to assume never existed in the first place.

Feed Your Head: Michelangelo Antonioni’s ZABRISKIE POINT

Tuesday, October 9th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point were written by Will Quade, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Zabriskie Pointwill screen on Friday, October 12 in our regular screening venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. This screening is presented with the support of the Center for European Studies, in conjunction with a Saturday, October 13 workshop entitled “Tracing the Impacts and Representations of 1968."

By Will Quade

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s output made him the preeminent scholar of modern alienation, but the beginning of Zabriskie Point strikes one as immediately different from his previous explorations. The camera darts from face to face in violent swish pans and close-ups as an eerie patter of drums and whispered vocals (Pink Floyd’s “Heart Beat, Pig Meat”) fill the soundtrack but then are soon replaced by a cacophony of passionate, earnest young voices. Above the noise, real life Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver attempts to inform and organize a politically radical group of mostly white students. We are privy to snippets of speeches and grand questions (“What if you want to abolish sociology?”) but are frequently lost spatially in this cramped room as we scramble to hold on to something consistent amid the mess of raised hands and erratic volume. Slowly we are shown a slouching young man three times, our soon-to-be protagonist Mark (Mark Frechette), eyes glazed over at the incessant speechifying. Soon, he finally stands up to the group, announcing, “Well I’m willing to die too… But not of boredom.”

It’s quite clear from this statement and fly-on-the-wall opening that it is Antonioni himself who feels distanced among the most politically active participants of his new world. Along with other directors such as John Boorman and Jacques Demy, Antonioni was one of a cadre of European filmmakers to be given unprecedented freedom by a major studio (MGM) and used this to come to the west coast. After his commercial and critical smash Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni took his newfound countercultural status and bankability to Los Angeles to document the rising student rebellions happening in 1968. But unlike his polished and highly manicured first English language film, ZabriskiePoint is rough, raw, and perfectly willing to embody the confusion and half-formed ideas of his two young leads.

Besides Mark, the film follows Daria (Daria Halprin), a flower child willing to secretary for some bread. Along the way her sometimes-boss Lee (Rod Taylor) becomes smitten and invites her to a real estate development in Phoenix. Contrasting with the crowded telephoto framings of Mark’s student meeting and subsequent riot and jail footage, Daria’s office building is photographed in the trademark cavernous lobbies and sharply defined offices of Antonioni’s previous films. As an enormous American flag billows quietly behind Lee’s upscale workstation, there’s nary a single diagonal to add any kind of further dimension to its image. In Antonioni’s most striking deletion of depth, Lee’s secretary is seen scrunched in the right fourth of the frame as she takes a message, seemingly crushed by an accordion-like wall that threatens to push her out of existence.

It doesn’t take long to see where Antonioni’s sympathies lay. Mark is forced to flee unfeeling authorities as we follow him from a violent encounter with police at a county jail to a murderous student demonstration. But beyond the cops that assault Mark, the sheer signage of the Los Angeles cityscape represents another type of oppression. Consistently dwarfed by ads for 7UP, airlines, or foodstuffs, Antonioni forces us to ride shotgun in filmed car rides spying on billboards, signposts, and painted advertising murals in all their gargantuan horror. It’s little wonder that Mark’s means of escape from the law and the America he so despises is to steal a small plane and ride joyfully above the cramped, commodified city set to Grateful Dead’s victorious “Dark Star”.

But after this midway point, Antonioni shifts his focus to the real estate firm Daria works for; here another altogether more sinister villain. We are forced to watch in quickly cut extreme close-ups a commercial for a future desert suburban paradise Lee is bankrolling posed entirely with dolls and models. If Los Angeles served as a current source of shameless capitalistic parasitism and political rut, the rape of the land and expansion of these literally hollow ideals prove to be the most insidious arms of American exploitation. In contrast, Daria and Mark flirt in the Arizona desert, fall in love, and begin a childlike tryst in the desolate Zabriskie Point, culminating in a playful, dusty orgy of young people (most of whom were members of Joseph Chaikin’s experimental Open Theater troupe). While Daria’s superiors would believe this land is empty and ripe for development, and Mark claims flatly, “It’s dead,” Antonioni and Daria view it with boundless life — even her proposed “killing game” is in fact an ever-growing list of all the living creatures inhabiting the severe landscape. In her eyes, the desert’s epic vistas are filled with scores of gyrating, exuberant lovers, presenting more of a utopian idyll than a freak sex romp. But it is exactly this type of innocence which cannot possibly last back in the real world.

With Antonioni fully investing us in Daria’s heart and mind, it’s only fitting that she guide us to the film’s shattering conclusion. Positioned precariously between the worlds of violent political protest and callous big business, we are implicated in her final choice and revelation. A suitably thundering finale provides an indoctrination of sorts that aligns the viewer completely with her experience. Amidst Pink Floyd’s narcotizing soft-loud “Come in Number 51 (Your Time Is Up)” and lengthened climactic imagery, what begins as pure metaphor soon evolves into something akin to the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A galactic hole is ripped open in Daria’s mind and by the end we have been transformed — we have evolved. Antonioni is no longer merely observing and reporting with an outsider’s suspicion. He has distilled in us a true insurgent spirit. In each viewer, a new revolutionary is born.

The Power and Pain of Fassbinder's THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT

Thursday, September 20th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) were written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Petra von Kant will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series of Fassbinder films on Sunday, September 23 at 2 p.m. This screening also serves as an appropriate prelude to our upcoming September 28 Madison Premiere of Nicolas Wackerbarth's Casting, a new movie about the pre-production process of a Petra von Kant remake.

By John Bennett

We have every reason to believe, at the beginning of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, that the titular character has commanding control over her life. A successful fashion designer, Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen, whose brilliance is hard to overstate) has just landed a coveted contract with Karstadt, a department store chain. She appears to be pals with American film director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. And she has recently left her husband, Frank, to whom she had formerly been devoted. She has her maid, the ethereally mute Marlene (Irm Hermann) do much of her designing legwork for her. When it comes to relationships, Petra seems well girded against the pain that they can cause. She notes to a friend that in relationships “you’re afraid of losing points” and that “people are made to need each other. But they haven’t learned to live with each other.” Not long thereafter, however, Petra meets Karin (Hanna Schygulla) a beautiful young model. Smitten, Petra initiates a relationship with Karin with the same crocodilian assurance with which she seems to conduct all of her business.

Things go south from there. A film about the destructive nature of power and submission in relationships, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant elides any display of happy times shared by Petra and Karin (if any were had at all). The film instead leaps forward in time to a point where things between the designer and the model have soured substantially, the former hopelessly in love with the latter, all veneer of control abandoned. The silent Marlene watches all the while, even as Petra’s orders for her become more spiteful and insulting.

In its original iteration, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was a stage play by Fassbinder that was first performed in 1971. The film retains an air of theatricality through its clearly defined three-act structure, its dramatic monologues, and its fixed bedroom setting. Yet despite all this, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant could hardly be called canned theater. Fassbinder explores Petra’s lair with a specifically cinematic visual resourcefulness, diluting the theatricality of the original text. Fassbinder uses close-ups to show snarling laughter and tear-streaked cheeks, images that are so crucial to the heart of the material that would have been difficult to communicate as effectively on stage.

Fassbinder also uses a camera to redirect focus, making characters’ reactions just as worthy of attention as their words. When Sidonie (Petra’s friend who first introduces her to Karin) first arrives at Petra’s apartment, the friends’ first moments of conversation are heard but barely seen through two windows, the second of which has venetian blinds drawn nearly all the way. The shot’s main subject is the silent Marlene, forlornly bowing her head so that her face is obscured by shadow as she presses a hand against the window. What’s more, the camera often places us on or close to Petra’s bed, heightening the feelings of frustration and inertia that are experienced by both Petra, crippled by her romantic longing, and Karin, who lounges on the bed with a discontented air of a cat whose owner won’t let it go nap somewhere by itself. In all these ways, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant captivates us without ever needing to let us leave its sole setting.

It’s true that the film isn’t the easiest watch, and there are no doubt countless people for whom the film’s painful romance may hit a little too close to home in one way or another. But can we also say that The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant offers kinds of pleasure as well? There are times when we all wish we could behave as badly as Petra during the film’s last act. When Sidonie arrives at Petra’s apartment with a birthday present, von Kant squeezes her glass of gin so hard that it explodes. Soon thereafter, she stomps on her tea set like Godzilla wearing Gaultier. The insults hurled by Petra at Karin, Marlene, and even her own family have a spitting, vituperative precision that one wishes were as easy to summon under certain circumstances as Petra makes it seem. At times, you can’t help but marvel at the devastating wit of some of the acrimonious rejoinders Fassbinder was able to dream up. When Karin prepares to walk out on Petra, the designer drunkenly muses: “I wonder why you didn’t work the streets from the beginning.” Alluding to Petra’s money and status, Karin replies, “It was less strenuous with you, darling.” Check mate. When Karin clinically and cuttingly tells Petra that “you thrive on suffering,” she might as well be addressing an audience that will gladly stay put until they witness just how far, fast, and hard Von Kant will fall—an audience that may simultaneously cheer the titular protagonist on as she sobs and barks invective and supplication, as she both downs and breaks glass after glass of gin.

If you’re not enough of a masochist to enjoy such emotional excess, than you could at least remain transfixed by the hellish splendor of the production design of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. von Kant’s white shag carpet—a kind of flooring perfect for gripping in besotted despair—runs all the way to the film’s most beautifully ludicrous piece of décor: a print Poussin’s “Midas and Bacchus,” whose characters seem to writhe in similar pleasure and agony as those of the film. A small menagerie of nude mannequins seems, like Marlene, to silently move and observe the film’s actions on their own volition. And then there are the costumes. Designer Maja Lemcke apparently did not work on any other film besides The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, but the film contains a career’s worth of beautifully insane dresses and wigs. Though there are many great looks to savor in the film, nothing can quite top the flamboyance of the outfits worn by Petra and Karin during their first evening together. Petra, nearly topless and draped with beads, looks like someone just rubbed a lamp to summon her. Karin, in a sultry Egyptian looking dress accessorized with metallic neck and arm bands, looks like Cleopatra from some angles and Barbarella from others. These may sound like knocks, but they’re not: they’re part of the over-the-top aesthetic that makes The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant a joy to watch, despite (or, for the Marlenes in the audience, in addition to the film’s challenging and perceptive ideas about the power and pain of relationships.

All That the Neighbors Allow: Todd Haynes's FAR FROM HEAVEN

Tuesday, September 18th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven(2002) was written by Pauline Lampert, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Far from Heaven will screen in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Friday, September 21. Free admission!

By Pauline Lampert

The title sequence for Todd Haynes’ 2002 film, Far From Heaven, mirrors that of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows to such an extent that one might assume the film that follows is a faithful remake of Sirk’s original masterpiece. While not identical, the rhythms and imagery of both sequences feature obvious similarities. They each have cameras craning down between tableaus of suburban pastoralism, replete with autumn leaves and quaint city squares, until they eventually rest on the facade of a single family home. The similarity in the films titles, announced in arresting 1950s-style-typeface, draw further comparisons and hint at the films’ parallel narrative trajectories. Both tell the story of a middle-aged housewife who falls in love with a man that the community deems unworthy, and is faced with either letting go of her chance at happiness or giving up her position in suburban paradise.

In All That Heaven Allows the feather-ruffling “forbidden love” is between a lonely widow, Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), and her strapping young gardener, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Far From Heaven, on other hand, features an interracial romance between an unhappily married housewife, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), and her black gardener, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). The premise bears enough resemblance that Far From Heaven is often understood as a “retelling” of All That Heaven Allows. However, that classification oversimplifies Haynes larger project. While Far From Heaven certainly pays homage to All That Heaven Allows, it does not just shoehorn a contemporary social issue into a readymade narrative structure. Rather, Far From Heaven adopts traits from a variety of melodramas, including the Max Ophüls drama The Reckless Moment (1949), and both Sirk's 1959 and John M. Stahl's 1934 versions of Imitation of Life, creating an amalgam of different conventions of the genre.

Prior to making Far From Heaven, Haynes was best known for his association with the New Queer Cinema movement of the late-1980s/90s. Haynes, who majored in semiotics in undergrad at Brown University, got his start in low-budget, experimental productions where he combined his interest in film and linguistics to explore the constructs of cinematic language. His first major work is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) in which he reenacts the life and career of Karen Carpenter using a combination of documentary footage, miniatures, and Barbie Dolls. Given his background in D.I.Y. filmmaking techniques, Haynes might not seem the obvious choice to recreate the Technicolor splendor of a 1950s melodrama. However, he readily took to the formalism of the Sirkian style and proved the ideal person to bridge the gulf between the intellectualism of art cinema and the demonstrative emotional content of the so-called “weepie.”

While it may not be obvious upon first glance, roots of Far From Heaven can be found in some of Haynes’ earliest work. The bricolage style of Haynes’ Superstar is worlds away from the gloss and glamour of Far From Heaven’s Hollywood production, but the aim of both projects is very similar: to create entirely manufactured worlds, and to use the artifice as a means of exploring the genuine emotionalism of the films’ themes.

In a 2002 interview with Indiewire, Haynes discusses his fondness for creating these erzatz spaces as means of exploring the emotional terrain of his characters. He says the cinematic language of the Sirkian melodrama “embodies more potential for emotional feeling than anything that mimics what we think of as reality.” In Haynes’ hands, Far From Heaven becomes a study of surfaces and the way that the artificial sonic and visual textures of melodramas are able to convey the interiority of the characters. All the formal elements of the film, including the Elmer Bernstein score, and the brightly colored lighting, work in unison to create a bold expressive palate. For every scene, Haynes and his cinematographer Ed Lachman designed color charts that were specifically calibrated to convey the emotional tenor of the moment.

One of the primary and most obvious aspects of the filmic language that Haynes is manipulating is the dialogue. The script makes unironic use of 1950s slang and shorthand, and the actors perform in such a way to augment the mannerisms of their performances. Julianne Moore doesn’t so much speak her lines, but intone them—delivering them in a cheerful sing-songy rhythm which both recreates the vocal patterns of the era and disguises the reserves of frustration and sadness at the core of her character.

Despite the obvious artifice of the form, Haynes doesn’t provide any emotional remove. The audience is asked to accept the outdated mode of filmmaking, and to let the expressivity of the form work its magic. The result is a compounding of the resonance of every aspect of drama. We are made extra uneasy at the very obvious power-imbalance between the wealthy white figures in the movie and their limited interactions with people of color. This is made particularly apparent in scenes between Cathy and her maid (future Oscar winner, Viola Davis), which is marked by a stilted politeness, despite their desires for a genuine connection.The stylization also serves to underscore when things are amiss in Cathy’s world. For instance, there is a deliberate, but subtle, break from the Production Code milieu when, during the first third of the movie, Cathy’s husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) drops an “f-bomb.” This moment of emotional violence is made all the more shocking by its fracturing of established dialogue patterns.

But of course the artifice’s primary function is to heighten the romantic drama between Cathy and Raymond--this is a melodrama, after all. The experiment at the heart of Far From Heaven shows that while the oppressive social forces at play may alter and shift, the underlying emotions of forbidden romance will always resonate. With this project, Haynes proved that postmodern pastiche can be just as heart-wrenching as any 1950s Hollywood film, showing once and for all that the road to heaven is fraught for everyone, of every generation, and audiences who care to accompany these characters on their journeys would do well to pack a hanky.

Fassbinder's Spin on Sirk: ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL

Thursday, September 13th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst Essen Seele Auf, 1973) was written by John Bennett, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Fear Eats the Soul will screen at 2 p.m. on Sunday, September 16 in the Chazen Museum of Art as part of our Fassbinder series and also as the middle film in an unofficial trilogy beginning with Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (screening September 15) and concluding with Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven (screening September 21).

By John Bennett

The blunt, philosophical statements that abound in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder might lead one to believe that the German director could have been the world’s most humorously pessimistic fortune cookie writer. Among the titles that sound like sad advice—Love Is Colder Than Death, Beware of a Holy Whore, etc.—Ali: Fear Eats the Soul stands out as one of the most notable. As if “fear eats the soul” might be misconstrued as too cheery, Fassbinder begins his 1974 film with another melancholy admonishment that could have easily served as a title of another one of his wonderfully bonkers feel-bad movies: “happiness is not always fun.” With these two simple, sad statements, Fassbinder begins his simple, sad film about Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), an older cleaning lady from Munich who begins a deeply emotional affair with Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a strapping migrant laborer from Morocco. As the two initiate their passionate affair, they must face the adversarial forces of Ali’s demanding and demeaning job, Emmi’s selfish children, and, most stingingly, the unconcealed racism and condescension of Emmi’s neighbors and coworkers.

In both story and style, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul owes a great deal to the excessive melodramas of Douglas Sirk—specifically Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955), in which an older woman begins an affair with a younger man in an uptight and gossipy American town. Fassbinder more or less grafted this plot template onto Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, making the heroine older, the hero a foreigner, the neighbors nastier, and the children lazier and stupider. Fassbinder drew not only from the story of Sirk’s film, but also its mise-en-scène. In a 1971 article extolling the virtues of Sirk’s films, Fassbinder wrote that Sirk made films “with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, with all these crazy things that make it worthwhile.” Fassbinder populates his frames with similarly ostentatious imagery. Brightly colored costumes with elaborate designs burst at the neckline with severe collars, not unlike the costumes Dorothy Malone wore in Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1957). Like Sirk, Fassbinder lights his actors in a bright, confrontational way that leaves no flicker of affect unobserved and in a way that casts shadows of stair railings and window grates in large decorative patterns on walls.

Yet Fassbinder takes care to put his own spin on this style of mise-en-scène as well. Where Sirk uses movement of both camera and subject, Fassbinder seems to value stillness. Emmi’s gossipy neighbors or lunching coworkers adorn stairways and halls with the frozenness of statues. A similar stillness pervades long shots that observe and frame characters through doorways. The film’s close-ups linger on expressions, frozen with emotion, for several seconds before a character begins to speak. Sirk gave full stylistic voice to his characters emotional lives. In Ali, Fassbinder gives his images and story a Sirkian intensity, but arrests the fluidity of Sirk’s style, making the passions of the film simmer in a frustrated slow burn.

In addition to being an intellectual melodrama, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a film that is interested in both the immigrant experience in Germany as well as German xenophobia. This was not the first time Fassbinder had addressed this issue on the screen. In his second feature, Katzelmacher (1969), the director stepped in front of the lens to play a Greek migrant worker who faces harassment at the hands of young, listless Münchner. As is baldly apparent in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, many German characters openly harbor viciously racist attitudes towards African immigrants. The film also doesn’t shy away from the systemic disadvantages that immigrants face. When Ali is rushed to the hospital with a stomach ulcer, a doctor with the bedside manner of an undertaker informs Emmi that many migrant workers develop them due to the stress of their working conditions and that Ali will be back in the hospital before long.

These moments of xenophobia are plainly expressed by the film, but a closer look forces us to ask a more uncomfortable question: just how enlightened is Emmi? Though it is alluring to accept a somewhat pat interpretation of the film in which Emmi is a simple yet benevolent older woman, her statements about the Nazi regime deserve more scrutiny. During her first meeting with Ali, Emmi alludes to her own stint as a member of the Nazi party. Though she does make the membership sound as if it were compulsory, she nevertheless talks about the time with not a small hint of nostalgia. Later, she takes Ali to a restaurant whose sole virtue for her seems to be that it was a place where Hitler used to go to eat. More blatantly, Emmi begins bossing Ali around and showing him off as a physical specimen once she regains favor with her coworkers who had previously shunned her over the romance. These details should be taken into consideration along with Emmi’s apparent comfort around Ali and his friends in our ultimate estimation of the character.

On the macrocosmic level, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul deals with the social world of Germany in the 1970s. On a more intimate level, the social world of Fassbinder and his stable of skilled actors bleeds into the film as well. As Fassbinder said in a 1974 interview about the film: “at some point films have to stop being films.” Brigitte Mira had, in real life, been in a relationship with a much younger man during the making of the film. Fassbinder himself had a fairly tumultuous relationship with El Hedi ben Salem. The director shows up in the film as the beer-swilling louse husband of Krista, Emmi’s daughter—a role played by the versatile Irm Hermann, with whom Fassbinder had lived for a period of time. If so much of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul feels true to life despite its florid, stilted stylization, it may be because the film is true to life on scales both vast and intimate.

A Cinema of Beautiful Devastation: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS

Thursday, September 13th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955) was written by Erica Moulton, PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of All That Heaven Allowswill screen at the Cinematheque on Saturday, September 15 at 7 p.m. Sirk's film screens as a prelude to two additional screenings of movies directly inspired by All That Heaven Allows: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul(screening September 16) and Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven(screening September 21).

By Erica Moulton

The reevaluation and reappreciation of Douglas Sirk happened only a few years after the release of his run of melodramas in the 1950s that included Magnificent Obsession (1954), Written on the Wind (1956), and of course, All That Heaven Allows (1955). While American critics cast aspersions on the heightened emotions and expressionistic style of Sirk’s films with Universal, across the Atlantic the critics and filmmakers that would soon form the French New Wave glommed on Sirk’s eloquent and emotional cinema. Only four years after the release of All That Heaven Allows, Jean-Luc Godard was singing Sirk’s praises in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, writing that his 1958 film A Time to Love and a Time to Die had “set his cheeks on fire.” Sirk’s status as an auteur of the highest degree was solidified by a series of interviews he gave with the French cinema journal and a piece written by Jean-Luc Comolli in 1967. American critics and scholars caught on by the 1970s and now forty years later, Sirk’s films are universally acknowledged to be among the most impressive films to ever be produced within the Hollwood studio system.

The irony of Sirk’s critical reappraisal is that the facets of his filmmaking that were counted against him at the time of his films’ initial release—their status as ‘women’s pictures’ or ‘weepies’, their use of artifice and stylization, their heightened emotions—are now the traits that are singled out for celebration. All That Heaven Allows exhibits the characteristic Sirkian touches, including its melodramatic plot: it follows a wealthy middle-aged widow played by Jane Wyman who forges a relationship with her gardener (Rock Hudson) and faces the scorn of her callous grown children (named Kay and Ned) and the country club denizens as a result. Wyman and Hudson worked with Sirk the year before in Magnificent Obsession and proved a popular enough onscreen pairing for Universal to greenlight a reunion right away. Both actors give sensitive, nuanced performances, but as with all of Sirk’s films, everything within the frame is given equal weight to what an actor may be doing in any given shot. In All That Heaven Allows, everything from the art direction to the lighting to the use of props is gorgeously calibrated to convey the inner life of Jane Wyman’s character, Cary Scott.

Film is a communicative artform, but Sirk is unique in how carefully he uses every inch of the frame, including the corners and the edges, to tell the story. As is his custom, reflective surfaces play an important role in conveying the psychological dispositions of characters. A standout moment from early in the film occurs when Cary stares into her vanity mirror as her children come into her bedroom. The camera pushes in and lingers on the reflected reunion as she goes to greet them, suggesting that her relationship with them is more of a façade than it initially seems. Reflected surfaces form a motif throughout All That Heaven Allows, culminating in one of the most devastating images ever produced in the history of cinema. I won’t spoil the moment for those who have not seen the film, but suffice to say, Sirk’s position on the rise of television is not left ambiguous.

The coordinated use of color palettes is also a treasured feature of the film. The saturated jewel tones of the country club set (Agnes Moorehead is introduced in a ravishing cobalt blue sweater set) are played against the earthen palette of Rock Hudson’s Ron and his eccentric, country-dwelling friends. The most expressionistic use of color and lighting comes when Cary is confronted by Ned and Kay about her plans to marry Ron. Each of her son’s verbal threats of abandonment register on Cary’s face, as the light sculpts its contours, highlighting her devastation. In the next scene, Kay weeps into Cary’s arms and begs her not to marry Ron while the kaleidoscopic light of a circular window throws unnatural oranges, pinks and greens over the two women. Sirk’s minute attention to detail makes for a thrilling viewing experience. In any given scene, you can be assured that he gave equal thought to the ice forming on the window panes behind Cary and Ron and to the words they are saying to each other. But to Sirk, both of those things are necessary and integral to communicating Cary’s emotional journey.

There is a sense that audiences nowadays are too sophisticated for melodrama. Dedicating a level of artistic rigor to the seemingly small, intimate problems of everyday life, in this case the romantic affairs of a middle-aged woman, is nearly unheard of in the Hollwood of today. All That Heaven Allows is also steeped in the social mores of the Eisenhower era, rendering the impediments to Cary and Ron’s love (their age and class difference) absurd to contemporary viewers. Upon revisiting the film, however, I found that the situations it presented were especially relevant to modern life. As a society that experiences life mediated by reflected surfaces that constantly invite judgement, we could all probably use a dose of Ron’s brand of transcendentalist-inflected individualism.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS: Lightness in the Face of Mortal Horrors

Tuesday, September 11th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) were written by Leah Steuer, PhD candidate in the Media & Cultural Studies division of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of The Little Shop of Horrors from the Jon Davison & Joe Dante Collection at the Academy Film Archive screened at the Cinematheque on September 8. The screening was presented in conjunction with University Theater's production of the Howard Ashman/Alan Menken musical Little Shop of Horrors, which returns on September 13.

By Leah Steuer

Mr. Mushnik’s flower shop is a desperate, straining sort of place, the kind of dying business that litters the bad part of town. It’s packed floor-to-ceiling with ragged blossoms, frumpy stalks, and signs that shrilly entreat the wandering bargain-hunter: “LOTS PLANTS CHEAP,” “We don’t LETTING YOU SPEND so much.” The same customers show up each week with the same complaints, from the aptly-named Mrs. Shiva (always in need of a funeral arrangement for an endless line of dying relatives) to local dentist Dr. Farb, who’s never above haggling for a cheap office plant. The frazzled proprietor Mushnik (Mel Welles) has only two employees holding the place together, and Audrey (Jackie Joseph) and Seymour (Jonathan Haze) are sweet enough kids but both a few blooms short of a bouquet. Life seems hopeless for all involved. That is, until Seymour brings in a shocking horticultural discovery that starts an uncontrollable flow of cash - and blood - all the way down Skid Row.

Roger Corman’s surprise B-movie hit The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) is zippier, zanier, juicier, and darker than it has a right to be; the film was reportedly shot in just two days and one night. Certainly, the production crumbles around the edges, with its jumpy transitions and endearingly home-made set pieces (particularly the carnivorous Venus Flytrap at the film’s center), but the spit, glue, and papier-mache of it all just adds to the fun. Corman had just finished his previous feature in record time, a satirical cheapie called A Bucket of Blood (1959) about a waiter who stumbles into artistic success by presenting his accidental murders as sculptures. Endeavoring to re-create the speedy production on a bet, writer Charles Griffith quickly re-wrote a new story onto the plot bones of Bucket, and most of the crew got right back to work shooting on an empty set left behind in the same building. Corners were cut at every turn, from the sitcom-like camera setups, to the limited rehearsals, to the hiring of local bums as production assistants.

Indeed, as one of the dirtiest and fastest efforts in Corman’s oeuvre, Little Shop finds extra charm in weirdness that never got a rewrite. Griffith’s florid, pulpy, off-the-wall writing shines throughout, beginning with a voice-over welcome to Skid Row, where “the tragedies are deeper, the ecstasies wilder, and the crime rate is considerably higher than anywhere else.” The bumbling, underdeveloped detectives Joe Finke and Frank Stoolie (satirizing Dragnet’s Joe Friday and Frank Smith) offer some of Little Shop’s funniest fake-noir dialogue. Nonsensical words and phrases become perfect character flourishes: “Isn’t it empirical?” squeaks Audrey, admiring the growing plant-monster, dubbed Audrey Jr. “It grows like a cold sore on the lip,” answers a pleased Mushnik.

The film’s most famous cameo comes from a young Jack Nicholson, chewing up the scenery as a masochist at the dentist’s office who eagerly greets the drill with an orgasmic cry of “Don’t stop now!” There’s bite and delight in every pitter-patter exchange amongst this menagerie of creeps, aided by gamely bizarre performances. Welles makes the most of his expressive face, delivering Mushnik’s barbs in a loud, powerful Turkish-Jewish accent. Haze’s weak, clumsy Seymour is exactly the kind of man who might be manipulated by a hungry plant. Griffith himself steps into several minor roles, including voicing Audrey Jr. itself with great nasal relish. And as in all Corman’s best B-flicks, the supporting characters often lend the best color and sharpen up the story. Take regular customer Fouch (played by Corman collaborator Dick Phillips), who munches on carnations for breakfast. “Oh! Such a thing, eating flowers!” exclaims Mrs. Shiva. “Hey, don’t knock it till you try it,” Fouch dryly replies—and in a nice twist of irony, it’s the plant-eating man who first encourages Seymour to nurture and display his man-eating plant. Indeed, many of Griffith’s puns gesture to the danger of the burgeoning blood-sucker so quickly that they’re easily missed; look no further than dimbulb Audrey’s love of “Caesarean salad.”

Though there’s fun and irony to be had amongst the mess, Little Shop carries some despair in it too (right down to its abrupt and gloomy ending). We often miss the heftier themes that undergird “light” film fare, from mid-century cheapies to teen movies to romantic comedies; these works too are built upon complex thematic cornerstones like ambition, moral ambiguity, and mortality. Indeed, it could be said that the success of the B-film lies in its immediate appeal to a more visceral place - a place where the audience swings wildly between fear, pleasure, sadness, and joy - and Little Shop occasionally pokes a sharp tendril into this place between its lighter moments. If Skid Row is all decay, Audrey Jr. represents growth: a chance for Seymour, Audrey, Mushnik, and the others to experience the beautiful, unexpected, and new. But Little Shop gradually reveals, particularly through Seymour’s tragic arc, that possibility always has a price. Raised by a hypochondriac mother, too shy to approach the girl of his dreams or escape his dead-end job, Seymour sees Audrey Jr. as a beacon of hope in a dark and grimy world. However, as he is coerced into providing blood to help it grow (and bring in money for Mushnik’s shop), Seymour finds himself repeatedly making the choice to kill. Others around him similarly find themselves torn between the glamor of the giant talking plant, and the terrible secret it holds in its roots and buds.

Though the 1982 stage musical adaptation of Little Shop and Frank Oz’s 1986 remake lean more heavily into these dark themes, they miss the magic Corman creates in nimbly dashing between these extremes; there’s something particularly delightful about the original Little Shop’s lightness in the face of mortal horrors. Though Audrey Jr.’s prop design leaves much to be desired, the image of its victims “growing” from its bulbs is particularly inspired and haunting. This lively, weird, and electric little movie snakes its vines around our ankles while we’re laughing, overcoming its modest resources to find surprising depths in its mad brand of black comedy.

The Swoon and Doom of DRAG ME TO HELL

Thursday, April 19th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell (2009) were written by WUD Film’s Kristen Johnson-Salazar. A 35mm print of Drag Me to Hell will be screened in 4070 Vilas Hall on Saturday, April 21 at 7 p.m. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Drag Me to Hell's cinematographer and UW alum Peter Deming. Admission is free!

By Kristen Johnson-Salazar

There is something utterly fascinating about doomed characters who you, as the viewer, hope will defeat the evil presence looming over their heads, while also wanting to watch the horrible misfortunes that invade their lives. However, like the genre of horror-comedy itself, there must be a balance to the schadenfreude. Evil Dead II and The Cabin in the Woods exemplify this effect of watching horrid events transpire, while never forgetting their comically outlandish and goofy nature.

Sam Raimi understands this balance. For many of the films he directs, he mixes horror and comedy to play with the audience’s expectations. Raimi has written and directed well-known cult classics, many of them synonymous with the horror-comedy genre. This is what makes Drag Me to Hell both a return to form as well as a contemporary Raimi shock, schlock, and fun film. The story was written right after 1993’s Army of Darkness; however, the idea was shelved while Raimi directed the Spider-Man films. Finally, when the third and final film in that franchise was released, Raimi dug up the screenplay titled The Curse, which would become Drag Me to Hell.

Drag Me to Hell is also a return for cinematographer Peter Deming, who previously worked with Raimi on 1987’s Evil Dead II. Since then, Deming continued working in a number of genres with other notable directors, including Wes Craven (Scream 2), David O. Russell (I Heart Huckabees) and, most notably, David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr.). In the last decade, Deming again reunited with Raimi for Oz the Great and Powerful and with Lynch for his revival of the Twin Peaks series. As a cinematographer, Deming builds lived-in worlds, even when those worlds are filled with supernatural and frightening beings. From all the films Deming has worked on, it is incredible to see his recognition of horror tropes and how he deconstructs and reorders them on screen. In Drag Me to Hell, Raimi and Deming play with our assumptions of a scene and explore why we care about characters like Christine (Alison Lohman), and why we want to see them overcome their doom. In his production notes, Deming writes, “From the beginning, Sam and I talked about being with her as much as we subjectively could throughout the film. We stayed right on Christine’s face a lot of the time. We covered scenes and gave her extra-tight close-ups, because we want the audience to be in her place.” This movie wouldn’t work without us caring about Christine.

Throughout the film, we, the audience, remain focused on Christine. It is almost inconceivable that her initially bright world edges into one of darkness and decay. Deming wanted realistic lighting to be used for this transformation. Even the scenes involving the garage or street lamps were never given corrected bulbs to add to this “heightened sense of realism.” This realistic lighting shifts to darkness as Christine descends into the world of the supernatural, often shown in canted angles and close-ups. Deming recounted that, “Sam loves B-movie stuff. He really embraces the wind out of nowhere and the camera shaking, and the inventive, interactive lighting. He eats that up.” These features can be seen during the séance, one of many moments when Christine tries to get her curse lifted. The séance scene is as fantastic as it is wild. It’s a visual and audio overload that calls back to bonkers scenes of Evil Dead II, when all things that could go wrong do, in comedic fashion, of course.

Since it results from an everyday occurrence for any loan officer, the horror she suffers through seems hyperbolic, yet it fits perfectly within Raimi and Deming’s hell. Christine’s ordinary nature makes her trial of escape that much more impactful and heart wrenching. If you are familiar with Raimi’s work, you have noticed that he loves the everyday person who has to become extraordinary through the supernatural. Like Evil Dead’s Ash Williams and Spider-Man’s Peter Parker, Christine finds herself in unfortunate circumstances and must fight to get her life back to the status quo; however, once it’s changed, it will never be the same. This returns us to the idea of the doomed character. How do we care for Christine, while knowing that her doomed fate is all but sealed? She doesn’t give up and continues to do everything that is possible and at her disposal. To the audience’s dismay, her actions even become extreme, hoping to lift the curse. But is that even enough?

Drag Me to Hell, like much of Raimi and Deming’s work, is visually off the walls and bombastically hilarious. It is everything you expect and more from a Raimi movie with this title, and it never lets you forget it.

DESERT HEARTS: The Biggest Little Love Story in the World

Thursday, March 15th, 2018

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts (1985) were written by Pauline Lampert, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A restored DCP of Desert Hearts, courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Janus Films, will screen in our UCLA Festival of Preservation series on Saturday, March 17 at 7 p.m. at our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. The DCP has been digitally restored by The Criterion Collection/Janus Films and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Outfest UCLA Legacy Project and Sundance Institute.

By Pauline Lampert

The legacy of Donna Deitch’s 1985 romantic drama, Desert Hearts, typically concerns its standing as the first American film to feature a lesbian couple in which neither partner dies, is institutionalized, or winds up in a heterosexual relationship. It is an unabashedly queer film, made on a shoestring budget and set in 1959 Eisenhower-era America, and it was released during the height of Reagan-era conservatism. A film of this subject matter is a purposeful affront to the social values of both the time in which it is set and the time in which it was released, and yet it managed to find a small but loyal fan base which has continued to flourish in the intervening years. This story of triumph mirrors the narrative of the film, in which its characters learn to rebuild their lives in a similarly unforgiving climate.

To those unused to the oppressive heat and parched soil of the desert, such a landscape may seem foreboding or even dangerous. It is not just hellscapes that are evoked in the terrain of sand-dunes and tumbleweeds, the desert also has a purgatorial connotation. It is a liminal space-- neither here nor there--a land where the displaced are left to wander for generations until they are deemed fit for polite society. However, despite what the cultural or biblical associations would have us believe, there are plenty of species that manage to survive in these areas despite the limited resources. The desert, it seems, is made for creatures who know scarcity and have learned to live without.

Desert Hearts’s co-protagonists, Vivian Bell and Cay Rivvers, are two such creatures of this sparsity. Helen Shaver plays Vivian, a high-strung Professor of English at Columbia University who has thrown her life into disarray by ending her marriage of over a decade and running off to Reno to begin divorce proceedings. Vivian’s sojourn to Nevada is in part a function of the state’s liberal divorce policies. From the 1930s through the 70s, Nevada was the go-to destination for a quickie divorce. This phenomenon became known as the “Reno Cure,” where women would establish residency by living in a hotel or dude ranch for six weeks, and eventually be granted license to rid themselves of their unhealthy marriages.

While the practicality of Vivian’s sabbatical in Nevada is apparent, the reasoning behind the self-inflicted upheaval is more opaque. She has no concrete justification for getting this divorce, at least none that she is prepared to articulate. When her lawyer enquires about grounds for divorce, the only explanation she can offer is that her marriage was polite and professionally advantageous, but never full of love or happiness. She claims she wants out of this marriage so she can pursue “an honest life.”

And so Vivian casts herself out of her ill-fitting life amongst the New York City intelligentsia, and sets off for the no-man’s-land of the Parker Guest Ranch, in Reno, Nevada. It’s there where she meets the free-spirited ingénue, Cay Rivvers (played by Patricia Charbonneau). Cay provides the ideal romantic foil for Vivian. Cay is outgoing and open about her sexuality, whereas Vivian is shy and repressed. However, like Vivian, Cay’s life is missing something that she can’t quite identify, but has something to do with surviving in an existential limbo of working rotten waitressing jobs at the local casino and the lack of viable romantic partners. Though ten years Vivian’s junior, the pair share an immediate connection that transcends their age and background. It is established quickly that Cay is able to intuit what Vivian’s desire for “an honest life” really means without Vivian having to directly communicate her feelings.

One of the film’s great strengths is its judicious use of expository dialogue. While Natalie Cooper’s screenplay does have some overt declarations of love, as well as some pointed homophobic language, the script mostly provides scaffolding for the production design and the nuanced performances. The film’s director of photography, Robert Elswit, (who would go on to win an Oscar for shooting the similarly arid terrain of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2008 film There Will Be Blood) lends the film a dusty romanticism. Though the film is a period piece, the sets never feel overly manicured or yoked to a specific time. From the kitschy Ranch House to the dingy hotel rooms, all the locations are imbued with a well-worn familiarity and comfort.

The photography also highlights the small gestures of Shaver and Charbonneau’s central performances. Shaver’s role in shaping Vivian’s character arc deserves special attention, as she serves a dual function as both the object of, and the primary obstacle to, the love story. When Vivian first appears onscreen her posture and costuming recall the icy remove of a Hitchcock heroine--specifically Kim Novak in Vertigo--with her fastidiously fashioned spiraled hair and grey pencil skirt. Shaver’s performance is a masterclass in subtlety. Throughout the course of the film she slowly unmasks the reserves of anxiety that lie underneath Vivian’s chilly demeanor.

Watch for a scene in the first act when Cay takes Helen shopping for some more Nevada-appropriate attire. Shaver’s comportment slowly alters as Vivian becomes more comfortable in Cay’s presence. Her arched shoulders start to relax and the stoicism that marked her character at the beginning gives way to an endearing tenderness.

Despite all of its formal and narrative triumphs, Desert Hearts was initially met with indifference by mainstream viewers. The reviews of the film were often dismissive, particularly Vincent Canby’s sneering take-down of the film’s earnestness and representation of female sexuality. However, the film found a small but vocal group of advocates. Deitch herself was among the most ardent champions of her film and helped cultivate and sustain the fan base. Eventually interest in the film became so strong that in 2017 Criterion saw fit to put out a beautifully restored 4K digital transfer on Blu-Ray. How fitting that a film that is in part about second chances and forging a circuitous path toward happiness should find itself the subject of renewed interest from critics and audiences. It is heartening to find that a film as good as this one can flourish even in the most unlikely of environments. It goes to show that although the landscape of quality lesbian filmmaking can often feel like a dustbowl, it can also be warm and full of life, especially when sharing it with fellow desert-dwelling film fans.